Play and games

In this chapter particular attention will be given to empirical studies on play and games as social action, with a focus on children’s everyday play and game participation in situated activities across various settings. As will be demonstrated, studies of how children organize play activities in situ provide a special arena for rethinking a set of binarisms that consistently reappear in the literature, such as children’s play as separate from the adult word, play and games as different activities, gender differentiation in play, and the distinctions between play and seriousness, play and work, and so on. Before that, in the first two sections, I will recapitulate how the study of play and games has evolved through several phases within different disciplines that have attributed to play and games an important role in (a) children’s development of cognitive and social skills and (b) the production of a children’s folklore, thereby providing a platform for further studies.